The story of John C. Beale, the admitted EPA fraudster and fake CIA spy, gets weirder at every turn.

Investigators say the former senior policy adviser scammed the Environmental Protection Agency for almost two decades, running off with unearned pay and bonuses, first-class airline tickets, a high-priced handicapped parking spot and months at a time to goof off on the taxpayers’ dime — all the while conning his bosses and his wife into believing he worked on the side for “Langley.”

He lied about being a Vietnam veteran who had contracted malaria in the jungles, and enjoyed a retirement party aboard a yacht in the Potomac only to remain on the EPA’s payroll.

And even after Beale pleaded guilty last week to defrauding the government out of nearly $900,000, dumfounded lawmakers learned Tuesday, he’s still legally entitled to his EPA pension.

“If Mr. Beale could perpetrate outright lies with impunity, what did he do in his daily work life in those rare days in which he actually performed work for the EPA?” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said a hearing Tuesday where Beale, 64, pleaded the Fifth. He added, “We need to discover, in fact, whether other individuals like Mr. Beale, not performing work, are now sitting in retirement collecting paychecks … for work they did not earn.”

EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins Jr. said last week, after Beale’s plea, that “the details of this remarkable story are unfathomable — and yet they happened. “

“An absence of even basic internal controls at the EPA allowed an individual to commit multiple frauds over a long period of time,” Elkins said in a statement.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee vented their disbelief that Beale had gotten away with his deceptions for so long and wanted to know what EPA was doing to catch other scam artists.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) pledged support for legislation to keep lawbreakers from receiving government pensions. Issa introduced a bill to strip pensions from those convicted of embezzling or otherwise stealing from the federal government, a penalty currently only doled out for treason and espionage.

The panel’s Republicans also had sharp questions about how Beale managed to fool EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who as former head of the agency’s air office had been his boss. Democrats pointed out that Beale also fooled his supervisors under the George W. Bush administration and gave McCarthy credit for airing the suspicions that finally brought his misdeeds to light.

“I think that Administrator McCarthy was suspicious” of Beale for a while, EPA Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe said. “We can parse through” who didn’t catch his long-standing fraud, he said but “she was the first person since 2001” to take any steps to investigate his claims that he was a secret agent.

Perciasepe told lawmakers that the agency has tightened controls on attendance, travel spending and bonuses.

Still, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) questioned why McCarthy didn’t just can Beale when she became aware that he was receiving illegal bonuses and had not retired as she had thought. “What does it take to actually get fired in this federal government?” he railed.

The cause of all this fury couldn’t be more nondescript: Beale is virtually indistinguishable from your modern-day bureaucrat, with a silver ring of hair and a slightly rumpled gray suit.

But his story is right out of Hollywood. And he almost got away with it.

Even his wife thought he was a CIA agent, and his alleged Vietnam-caused malaria persuaded the EPA to pay for his handicapped parking spot. He once told an executive assistant at the agency that he needed time off to wait for his CIA replacement to recover from capture and torture in Pakistan. She told him, “John, that’s what movies are made of,” according to the investigators’ testimony in the House.

Beale wasn’t doing undercover work in far-flung locales, though. He was at home in Arlington, puttering around, riding his bike or reading, he told investigators. Or he was at his vacation home in Massachusetts, or in California visiting his parents, according to his mobile phone records.

Now Beale is awaiting sentencing, alternating between an apartment in New York City and his long-time friend Robert Brenner’s guest room. He pleaded guilty Friday to defrauding the federal government and faces the likelihood of a little less than three years behind bars.

Beale appeared at Tuesday’s hearing but declined to testify. His attorney explained he feared the testimony could put his plea agreement in jeopardy. When POLITICO caught up with Beale as he walked alone from the Capitol, he said he’d probably be back to testify after his sentencing.

Since Beale wouldn’t talk, the lawmakers trained many of their questions on the friend.

Brenner, himself a former longtime EPA staffer, has refused to be interviewed by EPA’s investigators, who cannot compel him to speak since he’s no longer on the payroll. But he appeared before the committee to express shock over Beale’s guilty plea and to remind lawmakers of Beale’s once high reputation.

Beale’s “recent conviction for post-2000 thefts from EPA is so inexplicable for his friends and colleagues, including me,” he said.

The pair were friends at Princeton, once owned a vacation house in Massachusetts together, and later shared a retirement party.

Brenner also twice engineered the “retention bonuses” that Beale received. Those bonuses, given as a three-year, 25 percent salary bump, are an incentive to keep employees from taking outside jobs that they have been offered. But Beale received his first retention bonus in 1991 and kept on getting the money, then got another bonus in 2001 that lived past its intended life. The overpayment amounted to $500,000, investigators said.

Beale has paid more than $800,000 in restitution that will be delivered to the EPA. He’s also due to pay just over $500,000 to the Justice Department asset forfeiture fund within 90 days, according to investigators.

But that restitution represents only the unearned bonuses and salary, high-dollar travel reimbursements, and other perks that Beale took during part of his long EPA career, according to officials with EPA’s Office of Inspector General.

The charges against Beale encompass only part of what investigators said they found between 2000 and 2013. His misdeeds actually amounted to much more, they told senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee in a briefing Monday.

Investigators say Beale garnered a high level of prestige in the agency and outside it after he was instrumental in crafting the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. In 1994, he began saying he worked at the CIA on the side.

Beale was somehow a star of the air office in the Bush administration – he was repeatedly nominated for bonuses and performance awards, taking in an extra $33,951. In 2005, when he missed more than 400 hours of work, he was given a Presidential Rank Award – with a $28,201 payment.

He took in a full salary while missing two and half years of work between 2008 and 2013 for his non-existent CIA duties – costing the government $350,000, according to investigators.

And all along he was taking exorbitant travel that went unchecked by superiors or others in the agency. The IG’s office says it was able to confirm more than $87,000 in fraudulent charges for government travel vouchers between 2005 and 2007. He spent more than $300,000 on travel between 2003 and 2011, including a bevy of first-class flights.

Once, Beale charged the government $1,066 per night for four nights for a hotel in London, when another was clearly available for $375 a night. “Even I am outraged by this,” Beale said when confronted with the costs during his June 14 interview with EPA investigators.

Beale’s retirement fraud was the step too far that got him caught: He and long-time friend Brenner held a retirement party with another EPA employee on the “Celebrity Yacht” on the Potomac in September 2011. Notified on March 29, 2012, that Beale was still drawing a salary, McCarthy took the issue to someone in human resources, who had told her before that she should not question his high bonus payments, according to an investigator’s report.

She followed up by contacting Beale directly, leading to a string of emails where he clearly aimed to use a supposed “debriefing” process with his invented Langley job to explain the lag in his official retirement. Unsatisfied, she took the issue to the Office of General Counsel.

That eventually led to Homeland Security, who tipped Beale off about the investigation, and the EPA Inspector General three months later.

As the IG’s investigation got off the ground, Beale filed retirement paperwork in April.